First Look: Personal Hotspot in the Verizon iPhone 4

OK, so if you'd rather pair your iPhone to your Mac via Bluetooth and use Personal Hotspot that way, it's, again, pretty easy.

First, you need to pair your iPhone and Mac. So on the Mac, fire up Bluetooth Setup Assistant. (Bluetooth needs to be enabled on your iPhone too, obviously.)

Choose your iPhone, click Continue.

That popped a notification up on our iPhone screen that the Mac wanted to pair with it. The number shown on the iPhone was also shown on the Mac. So we didn't have to type anything, just confirm both places that yep, they match.

You'll know they're paired when Bluetooth Setup Assistant congratulates you for being so successful. Yay for you!

What's this Personal Area Network thing? That's the term for using your iPhone's connection to get your computer online, over Bluetooth.

Since we already have Personal Hotspot enabled on the iPhone, and the iPhone talking to the Mac via Bluetooth, we saw this popup appear on the Mac.

So we clicked Network Preferences, and saw this.

All we had to do from this point is click that Connect button, and zoom-kapow, our Mac was online thanks to the iPhone. We disconnected our Ethernet cable and everything.

Connected! (OK, so we hadn't disconnected the Ethernet cable when we took this screenshot. But we did after that, and the Mac stayed online, thanks to the iPhone's Bluetooth PAN.)

You can also click the Bluetooth icon in your menu bar, select the iPhone from the list of Bluetooth devices, and Connect to Network that way too.

The thing is, we don't really know why you'd prefer to use Bluetooth over Wi-Fi. Bluetooth will drain your phone and Mac's batteries more quickly, and who has a Mac with Bluetooth and not Wi-Fi? Maybe there's some reason we just can't think of on this brain-addled Verizon iPhone launch day. If you can think of a good application for this gee-whizzery, chime in in the comments!

When I setup network sharing on my Android (also Verizon), my Mac could not set up a Cisco VPN connection over that path. Anyone know if that would work with the iPhone as network host using PersonalHotSpot?